The other project that we did was that the Ministry of Education, before they responded to our legal case, had their own exercise in asking people for corrections to the dictionary. That was a very good chance to demonstrate how we work. We had 18 days in that event. We wrote a program that looks at the citations in the dictionary where two entries site the same source. The fragment of the sentence they cite, the example, differ by only one word. These kind of things usually mean a typo when people were first digitizing it. One of the two citations has a typo. The program knows which one is different but it doesn’t know which one is correct. So we put a call to action for people to click on the search button which looks to Google to see whether it’s being used somewhere else in the dictionary or if it is just a typo. We identified more than 5000 typos this way just by crowdsourcing people to do this work. The ministry had received maybe 6000 typos and maybe 5600 were from the Moe-Dictionary.

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